1026 ★ CHAPTER 25 The Sixties
In August, tens of thousands of antiwar activists descended on Chicago for pro-
tests at the Democratic national convention, where the delegates nominated
Vice President Hubert Humphrey as their presidential candidate. The city’s
police, never known for restraint, assaulted the marchers with nightsticks, pro-
ducing hundreds of injuries outside the convention hall and pandemonium
inside it.
A later investigation called the event a “police riot.” Nonetheless, the gov-
ernment indicted eight political radicals for conspiring to incite the violence.
They included Tom Hayden of SDS, yippie leader Abbie Hoffman, and Bobby
Seale of the Black Panthers. Five were found guilty after a tumultuous trial. But
an appeals court overturned the convictions because Judge Julius Hoffman (no
relation to Abbie Hoffman) had been flagrantly biased against the defendants.
The Global 1968
Like 1848 and 1919, 1968 was a year of worldwide upheaval. In many coun-
tries, young radicals challenged existing power structures, often borrowing
language and strategies from the decade’s social movements in the United
States and adapting them to their own circumstances. Television carried events
in one country instantaneously across the globe.
Massive antiwar demonstrations took place in London, Rome, Paris,
Munich, and Tokyo, leading to clashes with police and scores of injuries. In
Italy, students occupied university buildings, bringing education to a halt. In
Paris, a nationwide student uprising began in May 1968 that echoed American
demands for educational reform and personal liberation. Unlike in the United
States, millions of French workers soon joined the protest, adding their own
demands for higher wages and greater democracy in the workplace. The result
was a general strike that paralyzed the country and nearly led to the collapse of
the government before it ended. In communist Czechoslovakia, leaders bent on
reform came to power by promising to institute “socialism with a human face,”
only to be ousted by a Soviet invasion. Soldiers fired on students demonstrating
for greater democracy on the eve of the opening of the Olympic Games in Mex-
ico City, leading to more than 500 deaths. In Northern Ireland, which remained
part of Great Britain after the rest of Ireland achieved independence, the police
attacked a peaceful march of Catholics demanding an end to religious discrim-
ination who were inspired by the American civil rights movement. This event
marked the beginning of The Troubles, a period of both peaceful protest and
violent conflict in the region that did not end until the turn of the twenty- first
century.
And throughout the world, the second wave of American feminism found
echoes among women who resented being relegated to unequal citizenship. As
in the United States, personal liberation, including a woman’s right to control